... Contents Lobster 58 The Defence of the Realm The Authorised History of MI5 Christopher Andrew Page 134 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 London: Allen Lane, 2009, £30 Covering the same area as the Hennessy/Thomas book but with access to more recent MI5 documents, Andrew does at least refer to the dissenters named in the preceding paragraph. This is a thousand pages long and will be of major interest to academic students of British intelligence and political history for years to come. Discounted from sellers like Amazon, this is a seriously good buy. But I'm not an academic and my interests are political. I looked initially at two areas: what it said about MI5's ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 13) April 1987 Last | Contents | Next Issue 13 The View From MI5 Robin Ramsay Colin Wallace and 'Clockwork Orange 2'In 1974, while working for the British Army's Northern Ireland psy-ops unit, Information Policy, Wallace was asked (told) by an MI5 officer to work on a psy-ops project, 'Clockwork Orange 2'. Wallace's job spec. for CO2 was to produce a document, a first-hand narrative, apparently written by a supporter of the Republican forces in Northern Ireland. In this narrative a number of Westminster MPs were to be smeared with various illegal ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 40) Winter 2000/1 Last | Contents | Next Issue 40 Historical Notes Scott Newton MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called 'myths and misunderstandings', which features, among other things, 'the Wilson Plot'. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright's allegation that 'up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to undermine former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson'. MI5 say that the allegation was 'exhaustively investigated and it was concluded, as stated publicly by ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last | Contents | Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 The central role of MI5 MI5's job is to prevent radical political change in Britain. It is tempting just to write 'prevent socialism' but its activities are wider than that, covering all manner of non-socialist activities, including the neo-fascist right. (159) But their primary job is to ensure that the left fails. MI5 is this state's defence against the British left. The spy-catching stuff, the counter-intelligence activities, ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 28) December 1994 Last | Contents | Next Issue 28 MI5: New Threats for Old?Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O'Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, 6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O'Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, and the British Left of no consequence for the forseeable future, all that remains of the old agenda is the IRA. As MI5 Director- ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last | Contents | Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 An Outline of the Contents In 1976, just before and just after his resignation as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson made a number of charges about South African activities in British politics, and, more interesting and more serious, expressed anxieties about MI5 in relation to the Labour Government of the day and to himself personally. There was brief flurry of interest in the media and the House of Commons and then - almost nothing. (1 ) This extraordinary lack ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last | Contents | Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 Destabilising the Wilson government 1974-76 1975, the year that saw the formation of NAFF, was also the second year of an unprecedented smear campaign against the Labour Party, and, to a lesser extent, the Liberal Party. The major target of this campaign, and as far as we are aware the only senior politician who has been willing to talk about it, is Harold Wilson. Wilson spoke most extensively to the journalists Penrose and Courtier ( ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 39) Summer 2000 Last | Contents | Next Issue 39 Curried Knight Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history David Turner I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945 -- the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court ( 'Jack') Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6 . In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony Masters has Knight joining MI5 in 1924 or 1925 (1 ) and ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last | Contents | Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 Appendix 4: the Conflict Between MI5 and MI6 in Northern Ireland The conflict over the cease-fire negotiations was part of a struggle between MI5 and MI6 for control of the intelligence activities in Northern Ireland. MI6 had been called into Northern Ireland by Edward Heath, thus extending its normal area of operations, Northern Ireland being part of the UK and MI6, up till then, working only abroad. The UK was MI5's bureaucratic 'territory'. Maurice Oldfield ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 26) December 1993 Last | Contents | Next Issue 26 .. .MI5 goes on forever How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: 'Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut -- Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: "British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, and if not, he is the referee and ...